


There is no punchline

by Mama_Nihil



Series: Diamonds and Curls [5]
Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Dancing, F/M, Happy Ending, Knife Wounds, Purple Prose, Separation, as per usual, because that's my ultimate jam, can't believe I didn't realize until now, catastrophe hits, circle composition, dancing for Joker is sex, don't look for realism ok, harley needs to step up, hurting to save, of sorts, talk talk talk, therapy sessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22304560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mama_Nihil/pseuds/Mama_Nihil
Summary: Just when Harley thinks the biggest of her problems is what Joker will think of her article, all hell breaks loose. Now comes the ultimate test of her devotion, imagination, and resourcefulness. To win back her man, she'll have to sacrifice herself in a way she would never have thought of, unless one of their contacts knew a very special kind of craftsman.The fifth and final part of this series sees Harley let go of the final shreds of the old Harleen.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/Harleen Quinzel, Joker/Harley Quinn
Series: Diamonds and Curls [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561540
Comments: 21
Kudos: 23





	1. Run boy run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Run boy run! This ride is a journey to  
> Run boy run! The secret inside of you  
> Run boy run! This race is a prophecy  
> Run boy run! And disappear in the trees
> 
> ([Woodkid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmc21V-zBq0))

I stay away while he reads. At first I tell myself I’m just going for a walk. Beautiful evening for it, twilight and Sunday calm, et cetera. But in my bag lies a copy of the article, burning to be re-read with what I imagine to be his eyes. I stray into a park, the trees all black in the falling dusk. An empty bench beckons to me with its iron-swirly quaintness. I sit beneath a streetlamp, bothered by moths. Grey-winged and delicate, they hover above my pages like memories of ghosts, a frantic flutter to match my beating heart.

Eyes skittering over the pages, I wonder: how will he take this? What will my words elicit in him?

It takes me a while to understand what the turmoil inside me means. I’m afraid. This is a test. I’ve prided myself on my observational skills, but when have I gone back to my informants with the finished product and asked them to confirm? And when has the opinions of my informants even been important?

I make myself sick, sitting there. I care. I care _so much_. What if I got it wrong? What if he’s disappointed? Not angry, not disdainful, but _disappointed_? The mere thought sends the chill of death through my veins. When did this happen? When did I stitch myself to him to tightly that his pain reverberates in me?

A foolish question. It was ever so. 

With a sigh, I look out over the park, and it’s a painting of my soul. Shadowed to the point of blindness, danger lurking in every corner. I let an hour pass, but I can’t stay away forever. When the night is one shade away from black, I gather my things and head back. Time to face the jury.

Nearing our door, I feel lightheaded. Something feels wrong, so wrong. There’s a taste on the air, the bitter tang of Fate, and I don’t want to enter our lair: the first time I’ve ever hesitated to cross that threshold. When I step through, who can say what will happen?

I swallow grit, and turn the handle.

He’s sitting on the bed, head in his hands. He’s been sitting there since he stopped reading, waiting for me to come back so he could wring my neck? He looks pale, haggard. The face he wears after my caresses. Is that what this article was? A healing so deep and dark, he needs murder to soothe it?

I glance at the bed. The pages lie crumpled on his side of it, as if he’s slept with them. For a long while he says nothing. I hold my breath, but then I can’t bear it any longer. I have to know. Opening my mouth, I mean to speak, to ask, to lay bare the innermost kernel of us finally…

But whatever I planned to say is blown to kingdom come by the jolt that tears through the building. I clutch the doorway and look around. What the hell? For a moment it feels as if I’m floating. The only thing holding me in place is my pulse. But then the silence settles again, smooth like velvet, and I almost think it was all in my imagination.

“Jesus.” I breathe out and turn to him to make a joke out of my childish fright, when another shudder runs through the walls.

I’m dreaming. I must be.

No, I’m not. Someone’s coming. We’re being attacked, _here_ , in our _nest_. Here it is, the day I knew would come, but too soon, much too soon. The floor squeaks and trembles as they trundle down the stairs outside. I’m vaguely aware of shouts splitting the corridor apart, but they fade away as my head brims over with panic.

Next thing I know, I’m scrambling after Joker towards the emergency exit – the secret pathway to the Gotham sewers. My hand is wedged in his, stretched to breaking point as he pulls me along, hunched and hurried, through a dark maze. We’ve done this before – he’s drilled the twists and turns into my mind through relentless repetition – but this time it’s real, and my eyes and my brain are empty. I can’t see a thing, I can’t think. I only feel the scrape of stone against my bare fingers as I stumble after him. My legs almost give way as I rush down a flight of hard concrete steps. The universe spins and whirls around me. Just now I was sitting in a park, reading my own words, and now I’m in the sewer, and the dogs are set on us.

“We have to swim!” he calls over his shoulder. There’s a muffled crashing sound, and brown spray washes over the edge. _This isn’t happening_ , my mind keeps telling me. I’m going to break. I won’t survive this – my _mind_ won’t survive. I just stand there, swaying, groggily staring at the filthy water, so close and yet so far away. The world is slowly bobbing up and down, and at any moment now, I will fall…

Reaching up from the sludge, he grabs my arm and shouts, “Now!”

From above, cries can be heard. People in uniforms are hollering at each other, _they went that way_.

“Jump!”

The water is cold, deathly cold. I remember thinking I could jump into the harbor once, long ago. If I’d known this was the deal, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so brave. Then again, the alternative was losing Joker.

Same as now.

The thought gives me strength. The weight of my clothes drags me down, but I swim after him. I draw rasping, desperate breaths between arm-strokes, and my mouth floods with dirty water. It’s a miracle my shocked system is functioning at all. Perhaps body-memory is kicking in where intellect is failing. My arms burn with the strain. My lungs ache. I’ve lost sight of Joker. The sewage gets in my eyes, I’m blind. The only thing guiding me across the dark abyss is the thought of him, the ethereal idea that makes me more than just an empty husk. He’s the other half of me. Cut him out and I bleed to death.

For a moment, I imagine it reflected as a color at the bottom of the sewer: turquoise and impossible, it gleams up at me like a sunken dream. I have to make it. For him.

It only takes five minutes, or maybe five years. Gagging and spluttering, I pull myself onto the embankment, and his wet, slippery hand fumbles for mine. I’m wracked with dry sobs, entirely spent. Icy stone rasps my hands as I attempt to find my feet.

“We run that way.” He points, but behind us agitated voices boom out of the tunnel. They’re coming. In a minute I’ll feel their hands on me, dragging me away. Locking me up in a cell far, far away from him.

I see a sudden glint in Joker’s hand: a knife. For a moment, I don't get it. I almost laugh: he thinks he'll defend us both from guns with _that_? But then I seek his eyes, and there's a desperate, hard resolve in them. What, he means... what? I look down at the knife again. _I'm not into knife play._

_How would you know?_

"Joker..."

I clutch his sleeve, but his arm doesn't budge. He's stiff like rigor mortis. So this is it? Am I the sacrifice to get away? Impossible. I only wonder for a split second, because no, I can't believe it. Not after all we've been through.

"Do you trust me?" he whispers.

My answer is torn from me in a gasping sob, "Do _you_ trust _me_?"

I know now. He’s buying me time, possibly even freedom. He's offering me a life that’s not a series of rooms, of third degrees, of locks and testimonies and defenses. I won’t have to sit in court, the phony cardboard court of real-world judges, and tell my story again and again, because I’ll be busy getting patched up by doctors and nurses. And while I convalesce, I can gather my thoughts. Make my plans. Write the final chapter.

It’s the only way.

I bow my head, and it’s enough. He steps close to me, gives me a kiss, and raises the knife. But nothing happens. He hesitates, staring at me from under wolfy eyebrows. Like that night in my apartment. Are we strangers again? The fear is a beast in my gut. Slavering teeth ripping into everything I've dared to believe in.

“Hold up your hands. It needs to look like defense wounds.”

Choking back tears, I obey. _Slash, slash, slash_. It’s so quick. A couple of cuts on my hands, then another on my left arm. The sound I make is awful, like a squeal wrapped in a gasp, like a struck match. He’s not holding back. Maybe this is a punishment after all. But then I see his face, and it’s a death mask. He looks like he’s slitting his own wrists. I want to cradle his face with my bleeding hands, but he grabs me and holds me close, knife jammed against my throat just as they burst out of the tunnel and stop short at the sight of us. I lean back into him, melting into the last remnants of warmth and our life together, and the knife seems like such a good way out. He’s going to be taken from me. If they believe the charade, I'll be used as a weapon against him. Isn’t it easier to just fall on the blade?

“Drop the knife!”

It digs deeper into my skin, and for a moment I wonder – is there anger in there? Anger at me? I can barely breathe, and Joker’s chest is hard against my back.

“Help!” I croak. “He’s been holding me hostage for years!” He goes rigid behind me, and I can hear it in my voice: how true it sounds. How distressed I seem. Does he doubt me, even now? Did my article sow a seed of doubt? “Please…” I force a sob that comes much too naturally. “Please help, I just want to be free of him!”

I feel his limbs tighten and knot, his body remembering betrayals and cruelty long before me - convinced it’s happening again, because why wouldn’t it? He has more proof of hate than love. Why would a couple of years of us living together change that? He expects betrayal. This scene is much too familiar. It drops the needle in a groove that's way too deep. He can't climb out on his own.

I need to twist around in his embrace, need to look into his eyes and tell him it’s not true, but I can’t. We need to play this out for _them_ , and I can’t drop character, not even for him. The men in uniform are inching closer, hands raised with guns all pointing at us.

“Not a step further!” he shouts, and his voice breaks. “I’ll fucking kill her.”

I go limp in his arms. He means it. It really sounds like he means it. I want to dissolve in tears. It’s the end of the world.

One of the men takes a step towards us, and Joker slits my throat.

Yes. For a moment I actually think that’s what’s happened. But the shock dies down, and the pain is much too intense. If this was the final slaughter, it would feel like less and be much more. It’s just a surface cut, in a safe place away from my aorta, but warmth blubbers out of me, enough to seem chillingly real. The men bear down on him. The knife clinks to the ground as they wrestle him into submission. Someone’s hands are on me, scrabbling at my throat to stop the bleeding. I clutch my chest and blurt incoherent lies about what he’s put me through all this time, how he’s tortured me, abused me, all the horrible words I can think of, and my tears are Oscar level. My knees give way, and as the gritty road comes up to meet my forehead, I hear the slamming of a car door and turn my head. Blurred by grief, the tail lights ooze their bloody trail, just like in my memory. Through the window I see his muted laughter, and a cry stretches my mouth wide. The pain is larger than my body, it bursts my seams and spills down my throat, thicker and hotter than the blood. Fumbling for something to anchor me, something to keep me grounded until I can function again, I settle on a morbid joke. 

_Fuck you, stupid. Now I’ll need to wear a scarf_.


	2. So said the lighthouse keeper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am the very loneliest of all creatures in the universe  
> Indeed I am an epitaph to man  
> For having witnessed mass destruction like you've never dreamed and worse  
> I fear I shall bear witness once again.
> 
> ([Klaatu](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9do-0Fdis))

I surface to bandages and the sterile incense of medical salvation. It takes me a moment to find an anchor in the here and now. I’m inside somewhere, and it’s not prison. It’s a hospital – an ordinary one. I turn my head – _ow, ow, fuck_ – to look at the door, and I sense a presence on the other side of the frosted glass.

A policeman. Waiting for me to get better, no doubt.

I have a brief urge to call someone, to tell them I’m alright, but then I remember I have no one. Dad will worry when he sees the news, but I won’t give him the satisfaction. He’s part of the ruse. I’m balancing on the edge of a fictional knife to buy time, and he needs to believe it’s touch and go. The only one I really want to contact already knows I’ll be okay. As okay as I can be without him.

A wave of sadness crashes over me, and I cover my face with my hands in a futile attempt to shut it out. A bad move. By pushing the world away, I leave a vacuum for my inner demons to move center-stage. In no time, they’re performing an elaborate fucking hell-dance for my viewing pleasure. Endless repetitions of _that night._ A night of sorrow, of theft, of endings. A night that will fester in my memory forever. Endless moments of getting my throat slit, an eternity of separations. This hospital bed I’m lying in, it’s fucking useless. I’m nursing a wound far worse than the cuts in my flesh: the echoing void where Joker should be.

For a moment I wish he’d killed me for real. No one would have known. Perhaps he would have burned my body and sunk my teeth in the sewer, never to be found. My disappearance would have been a mystery, a post script to the vanishing act I pulled before the TV show. _Now you see me, now you don’t_. Now I’m a respectable researcher, now I’m gone from the face of the Earth. Peekaboo for one night only, and then poof. Gone again. I imagine the rescue party scanning the city, showing my picture to strangers, maybe even German shepherds scouring the ground with their noses – but nothing, no trace. Could have been a good way to go, actually. A stage exit to eclipse all others.

But Joker never wanted to kill me. Not even in the moment he doubted me.

I switch on the TV to distract myself, and of course there’s a clip of us. They’ve chosen a bit from our TV spot for the Joker Show, and someone is talking over it, mentioning me by my old name and title. Is there pity in the voice, or blame? Are they falling for it?

They freeze the video, and I freeze with it. The still of him… I want to step out of my bed, walk closer, and kiss the screen. I want to stroke that pale cheek. He looks so young with all his blemishes whited out. It’s a slightly out of focus image, and maybe that’s what allows me to see past the surface. He’s looking down, eyes still visible but lashes lowered, a shy look at nothing in particular, just a way to avoid. Like a child pondering a difficult question. Lips parted for a reply he doesn’t want to give. He’s trying to creep into himself, but the camera hounds him for an answer.

I try to swallow, but tinder-dry membranes just snag in each other and make me cough. He looks strange, different, like someone else. But at the same time that other person he looks like… is him. The realization forms, but has nowhere to land, because I don’t know what to do with it. So he blends with the face he wears to become what’s needed? I’ve always known that, to a degree. Why mull on it now? With that universally known mask, he’s passed under the nose of authorities for years. Because he changes _with_ it. When he really becomes himself, he becomes a stranger. It’s there, inside him, the potential for multitudes. He can become whoever he wants to be, or more importantly, what others expect. Just like me, when I wormed my way into that control room.

I stumble on another thought, but before I can examine it there’s a knock on the door, and I spring to attention. _Zzzinggg_ , the knife slices my throat all over again. Whimpering a curse, I blink away tears to see a nurse come in. “Hello,” he murmurs with a quick smile.

I do a double take: he’s familiar. He’s… one of ours. “Hi.”

“How are you…” He glances over his shoulder at the open door. “… feeling?”

I make a show of fighting to breathe – actually I don’t have to pretend that much – and my voice, when it filters through my vocal cords, is pitiful. “I need something… don’t you have anything…?”

“Morphine?” he asks, all nursy and empathic for the sake of any listeners. “You’re already on a high dose.”

I raise my eyebrows in question, and he shakes his head. I beckon him closer. When he shields me from the corridor, I whisper, “How come you can work here? Don’t they know?”

He smiles. “As long as there’s paperwork and a certain level of acting skills, you can pass as anything.” Louder he says, “Please lie down. I absolutely forbid you to leave your bed for a week.” He winks at me. “But don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you. Anything you need, Miss Quinzel.”

A moment’s hesitation where I realize that yes, officially I’m still Harleen. The nickname is only for the innermost circle of those in the know. “Thank you.”

He closes the door softly, as if a too-loud noise would open up the wound in my throat. I stare at the ceiling for a moment, try to breathe normally. So. I have a contact. Good to know. But also a guard, confirmed. Good to know too, but less good overall. So what now?

 _I absolutely forbid you to leave your bed_.

Well, there’s my cue. Groaning with the strain – it feels like my head will be severed – I force myself out of bed and totter to the window like I’m eighty years old. When I fumble it open, the air is sticky-cold like the frost on streetlamps – as if it’s dangerous to breathe. As if it will glue itself to my throat and kill me. There’s a taste of smoke and ice, and there’s car exhausts, too – a taste of the city itself. The fumes of its very soul.

Darkness is falling fast. The surrounding houses are already completely black, ominous in the twilight. A trail of blazing tail lights moves along the highway, and I’m reminded of the car that took Joker. They shine and jeer in the dusk, those cars, and I feel vague unease creep up my spine. What are they doing to him? Where is he? I think of the other hospital, imagine I see it across the myriad houses and streets, beyond the lights of lonely one-person apartment boxes. I imagine people talking about it, throwing looks at it, huddling in groups, hands balling into fists. They know that’s where he’s heading, and they wonder if the security is back in shape. Is the reconstructed wing enough to hold him, or will he burn it down completely this time?

Shuddering, I hug myself, but a creeping feeling has me on edge: something’s wrong. There’s something… something… _there_. Out in the darkness. For a moment I have the crazy thought that it’s him, and my heart reacts with a painful twinge. But it’s not, it’s not him. It’s something… I lean out, half expecting to see Death himself standing with his scythe on the ledge. And what my gaze snags on is not that far off. It’s a vague shape of nothingness, a compacting of the air, like anticipation in corporeal form. The shadows make it impossible to see, but I can _feel_ something… something… My eyes adjust slowly, and I pick out the odd fold of fabric, the shape of shoulders.

And eyes.

My brain short-circuits. I stumble backwards. There are _eyes_ out there! Someone is _looking_ at me! Heart thundering into presto, I almost fall over. I catch myself on the hospital bed as the dark shape moves in front of the open window.

It’s Wayne. Or actually it’s Batman, complete with his stupid little ears, but we both know the face behind that mask. And he _beckons_ at me.

 _Are you crazy?_ I want to scoff, but whatever that man is, crazy is not in his repertoire. It’s his most infuriating trait, that stubborn fucking sanity of his. So despite any rational misgivings, I obey. On legs that are brittle like sugar, I approach the window again. Drawn by the utter oppositeness of him, but ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. He jerks his head, as if inviting me to climb out and join him on the ledge. I almost laugh, but then I see the logic of it. He doesn’t want to be noticed by the guards, and if someone comes in I can pretend I’m planning to jump. I cock my head slightly, and he holds up his hand as if swearing a solemn oath. I grin despite myself. He wouldn’t break one of his own rules.

So out I go. The acrobatics involved threaten to rip my throat open again, but he gallantly offers me a hand and I take it. Leaning back against the cold stone of the façade, I avoid looking down. The wind whips at our clothes. More at his than mine on account of his cape, but I have a hospital gown that flaps white around me as his flaps black. Say what you will, but we probably make a dashing picture.

“Okay, so why are you here?”

He sighs. “I don’t know.”

There’s weariness in his voice, and for some reason it needles me. “Joker’s put away, or will be very soon. I thought you’d be pleased with this turn of events?”

He gives me a look, which is just a glint through holes in the black. “And you call yourself a psychologist.” Before I can find a suitable retort, he gives me a playing card – one of Joker’s. He hands it over almost reverently, like this is some kind of ritual I haven’t figured out. “He didn’t disfigure me,” he mumbles. “Somehow that gives me hope there’s something sane still in there. Or at least a calculating self-preservation.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Is it?”

I shrug, and the movement makes me almost lose my balance. _Stupid_. “It’s programmed into us to survive.” _Except maybe for me, because I’m out here, talking to this loony on a ledge_. “People who don’t obey it we call insane or strange. Those who commit suicide, those who let themselves be abused.”

“You’re quite sure he was abused, then?”

I bristle, but I can’t seem to find the right words to put him in his place. I’ve heard the words from his own mouth, for God’s sake. They shared a fucking father. But maybe Wayne too has an on again/off again relationship with the truth, what the hell do I know? All I know is we’re too high up for confrontation, nothing but cold, hard asphalt way down below. Excessive emoting must wait.

“Some say he saw it coming,” Wayne says. “That he knew the police were on to you, and he abdicated as a shrewd strategy.”

“ _Abdicated_?”

“To avoid being blamed. To avoid taking responsibility. Those are the ones who see nothing but a scheming, cold-blooded rat.”

I swallow. “Fair enough.”

“But others are less judging and more disappointed. They just feel he’s abandoned them.”

My heart pulses. _Don’t leave us in our hour of need_. But how does Wayne know anything about any of this? Has he been… watching? Without intervening? That doesn’t make any sense.

“And in the end,” he says, “what’s the point when ou– your leader is no longer there? Who will rule the mob in his stead? No one can. It’s all disintegrating. They won’t take orders from some usurper’s mouth. That’s what they are now, you see? Everyone, every single soul in your network: potential usurpers and traitors. They forget so quickly. They don’t care. They have their day-to-day worries. Why would they care about a man they no longer have to obey?”

He seems so out of it, so introspective. What is he trying to tell me? That he’s nostalgic for the good old days when Joker was his prize stag? “So what you’re saying is, your work is done?”

A snort. “Yeah…” He looks up at the sky, and I do too. It has the deepening blue silk color of long-dead royals. I unfocus my gaze a little and start picking out constellations. The stars aren’t fully visible yet. It’s that hour when they’re not quite strong enough to outshine the glowing firmament – like a breath held in anticipation, like the turning of the tide – but in minutes, the Northern Cross materializes. And yet it’s only because I see those stars from this very angle, from Earth, that they trace a cross at all. Out there in space, they’re lightyears apart and have nothing to do with each other.

At least I think so. I’m not exactly an astronomer.

“It’s just…” Wayne begins, then hesitates. “The… the _magic_ is gone. Not that I cared for his kind of magic in the first place, but…”

I say nothing. It’s not until this moment that I realize Batman wasn’t there when Joker was caught. Why wasn’t he there? He’s always there.

“It’s strange,” he says. “My sense of magic actually disappeared with him. Way back. He came to see me, or that’s what I thought. Gave me flowers, but Alfred took them away.”

Does he think I have any idea what he’s on about?

“My little playhouse with the fairy lights…” He smiles to himself, and it’s almost gruesome. That sad little quirk of the lips in the darkness. “I lost all that on the night he gained his crown. When he toppled me as the heir to this city. And the city itself fell from grace that night. The magic disappeared even as another magic took it over.” Seemingly jarred out of his ruminations, he turns to me and asks, “Did you ever see yourself as the hero in your story?”

“Wha… Of course. Everyone does.”

“Including Arthur.”

Arthur? I connect the dots immediately. Arthur tried to be a hero, but Joker doesn’t. He accepts his role as villain. And so did I, finally, at the Joker Show. I relaxed into the realization that fuck it, I won’t measure up anyway. _Why not step into the shoes that fit?_

But Batman refuses. He needs an outlet for his violent impulses, but he doesn’t want innocents to suffer, so he needs an enemy. He needs to be America at the end of World War II: with a target so undeniably evil he doesn’t have to defend his actions.

“You want him set free?” I suggest.

He sighs. “No.”

 _But you don’t want him incarcerated_ , I don’t say, because if I do, the truth will be apparent in my voice: that makes two of us. I wince, another realization hitting me: Wayne knows. He knows I want back with Joker. Knows I wasn’t his prisoner. But I don’t understand until this moment what that means: he can blow my cover. If he decides to talk, I won’t be able to play out my little Stockholm syndrome spiel. I’ll be thrown into a hole to rot, and not the same hole as Joker.

We’ll be parted forever.

Does he see it in my face – this _face_ that always betrays me? There’s a quirk of his mouth as he prepares to leave, an involuntarily sadistic spasm. Like an invitation to another chase, because he can’t live without the chase, but he also really, really can’t not win it. He’ll give it his all, and for all that he gave me Joker’s card, he holds the ace. Was it a final gift, a consolation prize because he’s planning to blow my cover? Did he come here simply to make sure I’ll run? To remind me he knows my true face?

This face. I’ve lived behind it for a lifetime, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s just a nostalgic clinging to appearances. Perhaps I need to make fluid the contours of my self. The story that’s almost written already, perhaps I have to rewrite it. Fuck the rules of syntax, and fuck the fucking standards of morality. I have to revise the Book of fucking Life. Because deep down, Joker always wanted to be caught. He wants to offer himself up to the jaws of the dragon. I’m the only one who can tame it, but to do that I have to discard my mask.

Yes. It’s time for my final transformation.

I wish I could have asked him: _Do you love my face?_ But I know how he would have replied. He would have cocked his head and perused my features as if only now gathering the data needed to make a decision on the matter. Then he would shrug. _I guess. What are you planning to do to it?_

Clambering inside the room again, I press the button to summon the nurse.


	3. Let it happen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts like storms and seas are raging  
> I know it is a matter of degree  
> But it's not the world outside that's changing  
> It's me
> 
> ([Waterboys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by5vV27oYkY))

The first thing I have to do is die, which is harder than you’d think. There needs to be a cause, a body, witnesses, and funeral arrangements, all sorts of things.

Days go by, days of moaning and asking for morphine I never get, stringing the policeman along on fake reports of complications and conducting my side business through the nurse. With a little help from a doctor I bribe with the promise of a new job with ten times the salary within the year, I take a quick turn for the worse and am declared dead in hours. She wheels me to the elevator under the ambivalent but helpless gaze of the now out-of-a-job policeman at my door, and then down to the morgue we go. From there, of course, the world lies open. I leave it to my friend in scrubs to arrange a funeral: I’m not choosy, any old body will do.

As a next step, I get in touch with the most reliable people in our network. Wayne was right, it’s starting to fall apart, and some have already gone full _every man for himself_ or even _I’m the king of the scrapheap now_. But a few still retain some sense of loyalty to the old system. Is it Joker’s aura, still clinging to me, that makes them obey me, or do I have an aura of my own? I’m a firm believer in not peering into gifted horses’ mouths, but I can’t help but wonder: this new me I’m wielding like a fucking scythe – how far can it take me? How far do I want to go?

Perhaps it’s just expectations. That I fill a hole they need filled. Stepping into the shoes that fit and all that. That’s what I’ll have to do, by the way – what I’m already doing, preparing for, as if my conscious mind can’t quite keep up with my berserking intuition. I’m going to become who people expect, even though they don’t know it yet. I’m going to apply for a role they haven’t even thought to cast, but when I turn up, I’m going to be so perfect they’ll just have to write the script around me. Which means I have to know what they need. I must open myself up to their pushy personalities and let them seep into me like sewer water: all their yucky thoughts and opinions, all those feelings and expectations, I need to take it all in, and then adapt accordingly.

Basically what I’ve done my whole life.

As I make the arrangements, I succumb to the sentimental act of perusing a mirror: the way you take a moment to admire your hair before coloring it. I do have a connection to this face, but for what purpose? It’s a dusty souvenir from an earlier life, from my travels in a country I’ll never return to. None of the yellowed Polaroids are worth keeping.

 _For you_ , I tell him in my mind. _Weddings are for pussies. With this operation, I thee wed_.

***

The world is pitch black when I approach the clinic, shining my steps along the gravel path with a flashlight. My heart picks up speed as I near the place. When I reach the door, I hesitate. The night is dark and moonless. Clenching my teeth, I press a button and hear a far-off bell.

For the longest time, there’s nothing. Then, even though I’m half prepared, my heart leaps up into my throat as I make out a shape inside. Like Batman on the ledge. Like my own shadow, about to be discarded and none too pleased about it.

I battle an urge to run. I can hear my own breathing whistle in my ears as I struggle to remain calm. For a moment, I imagine the shape is a sculpture, because it hesitates, so still, but then I see it reach for the handle.

And it’s too late to back out now, as the surgeon disentangles himself from the darkness and beckons me inside.

***

While I recover from the carving, I get to work on the rest of me. New clothes and a new haircut – I color it a mousy ash, not too far off from my natural blonde. _Don’t make too much of an effort_. Once the swelling in my face goes down, I have my picture taken. The nurse sees to it that I get my papers in order. A fake address, a fake CV, and fake letters of reference. I’m an expert in song therapy, and I’ve worked as the head of a mental institution in New Jersey for nine years. The slightly mangled accent a native Gothamite would pick up during that time takes some doing, but I get good help from a vocal coach and a drama teacher.

It takes forever, and forever eats me up inside. But this is the road I need to walk, however steep and desolate. It’s the only way back to him, and I hunker down and trudge the miles because in the end, I’m the only one free to do so. With his image hovering on the horizon, I change my gait, I tweak my vowels, I even drop my pitch a little. Whatever stray mannerisms remain from Harleen, people will chalk them up to familial resemblance.

Because my papers say Guinevere Quinzel.


	4. Astronomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four winds at the four winds bar  
> Two doors locked and windows barred  
> One door let to take you in  
> The other one just mirrors it
> 
> [Blue Öyster Cult](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7heNQmPkpWA)

_Nobody knows I’m here_.

That’s what keeps looping through my brain as I walk across the road to the hospital. _Nobody knows I’m here_. And it’s the most reassuring thought I’ve had for months. But I am, I am here, I haven’t dared believe it until now, but as I gaze up at the rows of windows with only the sapphire sky all around, I feel like I’m going knocking on heaven’s door. The tensions of preparation fall away as a faint breeze stirs my hair. I breathe in deeply, filling my lungs. The door swings soundlessly open on well-oiled hinges, and the stairs lead up, up, up in a never-ending spiral. As I walk straight into the performance of my life, vertigo makes a pass at my head. I’m lost in a sea of stars with nothing but a vague memory of constellations to guide me.

But this is my path now, and no one but me can travel it.

Shaking off my trepidation, I ask for the people in charge at reception. They’ve granted me an interview with their prize patient: _go on, knock yourself out_ they don’t say, but I hear it in their resignation as they guide me to the scene of my deception. _No one else has a fucking clue. If fresh meat comes in to have a try, who are we to stop her?_

But I’m planning to knock _them_ out – as long as I can convince Joker to partake in my charade. I try not to think about it, but the stakes loom ominous in my mind, impossible to ignore. He needs to recognize me in spite of my new face, but conceal that he does. He needs to forgive me for the article, or whatever the fuck is going on in that department. He needs to let go of the distrust that sprung from the way we were parted. And above all he needs to fucking _get it_. There are some tricky hurdles to jump before I reach my ultimate goal, but first on that list is getting Joker to cooperate on something I can’t even tell him what it is.

There’s a sickening sense of déjà vu when I’m let inside the same white room we once met in. Joker sits chained at the table with a cigarette between his fingers, just like he did back then. There’s a guard, again. And I can’t meet Joker's gaze, which is also a worrying echo. Here I am at last, and I can’t look him in the eye because I’m not sure where we are with each other. We left everything on a cliffhanger, and this is the first scene of the sequel. When I finally force myself to look up, his eyes are nothing like the sea, but I become the sea when I look into them.

_Joker. My animus, my nemesis, my all.  
_

But I can’t say a thing, and for a moment there’s something utterly mystified in his face. He scans the whole of me, tries to take it in: the anomalies jostling for room in the almost-familiar. I can see him process the prim clothes, my improved posture, the elegant hair. Everything wrong on so many levels, and yet…

He sees. Yes, he sees it now, sees who I am. Something young and startled passes over his face before he thinks to censor it. But he does, he does censor it, whether from a general sense of self-preservation – holding his razor-lined cards close to his chest, as it were – or because he’s accepting that we’re in this together, I don’t know. All I know is we have to play out our reunion under scrutiny – not only the guard’s, but the people behind the one-way glass covering an entire wall. I’m not free to send them packing, because I’m just a tourist here – a well-credentialed tourist, granted, but an unknown entity all the same. I need to tread lightly in this prologue, or there will never be a story at all.

“Hello, Arthur,” I say with a smile.

Joker’s eyes narrow at the name. For a moment he looks suspicious, and I try to communicate with my eyes, hoping he’ll understand what I’m really saying. _Please make a miraculous recovery under my care. Put on your fucking mask again_.

As if in response to my silent plea, his eyes flick down into introversion. Shielded by soft lashes, he breathes out a thin stream of smoke: a white fusion of all the things he doesn’t say – the thousand million possible combinations of syllables that can explain in painful detail what he’s thinking. But no one has ever been interested in those million combinations. For every person like him there comes a time in their life when they stop angling for the right words. After years of hooking the prettiest descriptors, the aptest metaphors, they allow those silver-slick perfections to slip away unused – because in the end, who wants to hear them?

I do. I want to hear them. But there are too many ears right now, and what the hell can we say, either of us, that will pass as first-meeting-with-patient?

He looks up again, trailing the alien topography of my cheeks and nose with his gaze: the shifted angle of my eyebrows, my narrowed chin. The truth of my ordeal is there, inscribed in my mangled face. He can see the sacrifices I made to come here in the sawed-down structures of my cranium.

He’s quiet for the longest time. His eyes flick almost imperceptibly towards the guard, and then he mutters, “Are you here to replace the head of the hospital?”

My heart flies up in my throat. But then I realize: he’s supposed to be insane. The people who eavesdrop on this conversation will just hear a lost cause teasing the newcomer.

“Nah,” I say, or gulp, which means _no_ to the spectators behind their one-way glass, and _you can bet your sexy ass I am_ to Joker. “I’m only here to help you.”

Something stirs in his eyes – something luminous. “And how exactly are you planning to do that?”

I’m 99% certain he means how will the position as head of the hospital become vacant. Leaning back to feign relaxedness, I shrug and toss off a playful, “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.” The emphasis on _you_ is infinitesimal. Will our audience buy the phrase as a generic joke and not look into it any deeper? I don’t dare glance at the guard, and I don’t even dare think about the people behind the glass.

But Joker makes a face as if he’s fighting down revulsion. A bravura performance from someone who equates death with a cosmic prank. “Don’t make jokes about killing to someone with my history. They’re practically… _poison_.”

“Sorry.” I can barely keep my mouth under control. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

He raises an eyebrow and stubs out the cigarette. “That something you do with all your patients?”

“Actually…” I hesitate. I have no idea how to answer, how to play this, and for a moment I’m too aware of it, like a cartoon character running over the abyss. “No. I thought I’d chance a joke with you, because you made one first.”

He blinks. “That’s… not untrue.” He seems genuinely impressed, or is it just another ruse? “Huh. Now you caught me unprepared. I tip my hat to you. I wasn’t prepared for someone to actually _listen_.”

Ouch, the venom.

“So that’s what you do, huh? Guinevere Quinzel, listener extraordinaire? That’s how you make all your little connections and adapt the game to the patient? I think I told you once that you’re not as smart as you think.”

“No, you didn’t,” I say a little too sternly. “We haven’t met before.”

He smiles at some private joke. “I think I did,” he says so softly that I’m probably the only one who can hear it. Louder, he says, “It doesn’t matter. What I mean is, you’re obviously compensating for your lack of training, intellect, whatever, by being wide open. You take the trouble to _listen_ , when no one else ever does. You take it all in. You read everyone and everything. And then you become whatever you need to be. Right?”

I swallow drily, give him a wary look. Is he gunning for my fucking cover? Does he want the eavesdroppers to put two and two together? This is a meant to be a therapy session, not the banter of a years-old couple.

“Well, that makes two of us.” He makes to cross his arms, realizes he can’t, and leans back instead with his hands in his lap. “We’re both mouthpieces, molded into whatever people need us to be. But you’ve weaponized it.”

Oh… Maybe he’s mimicking the stance he took the first time we did this? There actually is precedence to this behavior, and if he plays it right it will look like part of a pattern, but between the lines we might be able to insert a measure of truth. Right now, he’s indulging in his favorite – even famous – pastime during incarceration: taunting the new psychologist with his unexpected wit, showing off his insightfulness to gain the upper hand.

“I bet you like to say that you give voiceless people a voice – people like me.” His eyes flick up, suddenly hot and dangerous. “And maybe you do. But mostly I think you talk over them. You speak their minds in your voice.” He shrugs. “Or speak your mind in their voices, I don’t know. But you’re wide open to the world, to other people’s thoughts and feelings, maybe to the point where it’s a problem. Am I nearing the truth yet? And your only way to cope with that openness is to put your own matrix over their voices, to make them make sense. So for all your listening, what you really want to do is talk. You’ll talk over _me_ given half a chance.”

There’s definite sharpness in there. He means the article, of course he does. But it’s not news. I already know I hold the fucking ace when it comes to dominant discourses, I’m a fucking researcher, which is as powerful as language comes. So why does it sting?

Picking his way through the words like thorny bushes, Joker murmurs – softly, but still with an edge – “So whatever you say about me after this session, it may not be strictly untrue, but it’s still your voice. Even when you _quote_ me,” and here he makes a tiny pause to skewer me with his eyes again, “you’re the one who transcribes my words in your report. You’re the one who chooses how to punctuate.”

So he’s accusing me of, what? Wounding him with commas? I consider saying something, but then I remember: I’m supposed to be a song therapist. Well, maybe this is a kind of duet, but my schtick is letting my patients lead. Maybe that’s what will make me stand out as incomparably insightful? What if all those failed psychiatrists ogling us behind that glass wall do exactly what Joker says – talk over their patients until there’s nothing, no air left? What if he’s accusing them as much as me?

If so, my best course of action is to be fucking silent. After all my efforts to be heard through the years, that’s the ace I’m pulling out of my sleeve: to keep schtum when it fucking counts.

“Of course, I’m the same,” Joker says when he realizes he still has the floor. “I want to speak for the world, like the comedian I am.” He shoots me a brief look, playful now, because yeah, now we’re really covering ground we’ve already scoured. But the idiots behind the glass don’t know that. They think they’re just seeing his pattern play out, they think they know what he’s all about. “But maybe I can’t read the world as well as you do.”

His eyes narrow as he waits for me to take the bait. He thinks pride will make me want to dazzle my audience, prove his point. But that’s not the kind of dazzle I’m going for today.

Noting my silence, he looks momentarily amused. “Whereas it takes _me_ by surprise when I do tap into something real,” he says. “I became a figurehead, but I didn’t seek it. I wanted them to hear _me_ , not use me to say their piece. And yet I was wide open for the hijacking. That’s the trouble with letting people in: no matter what you say, it becomes their property.”

He leans forward, and a purely physical part of me wants to mirror him, to lean forward too and sample some of that warmth I’ve been missing. He’s close enough for me to get a whiff of hospital soap, mingled with a hot, greasy scent that’s pure him – like he’s internalized all that face paint and you can’t sniff him without getting a noseful of wanton clown.

The guard in the corner shifts his weight.

Suddenly afraid that it’s showing – that we’re displaying too much emotion, premature for our budding patient-doctor relationship – I stand up. “I think it’s time for some vocal exercises, don’t you?”

He blinks up at me, thrown by my sudden veering off path. But then he too stands up – he’s not shackled to the table, I realize, and the guard takes a step in our direction, frowning at the changed conditions. I give him a look that says I know what I’m doing, and then I step closer to Joker. He holds out his hands to show he’s ready to submit to whatever shenanigans I’ve cooked up, and I feel suddenly clumsy and foolish. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let this opportunity to set up a functioning ruse go to waste.

“Alright, let’s try a simple note. Just a single note, to get your voice out there. Your true voice. Let’s find it.” Joker gives me a look, and I avert my eyes so I don’t give myself away to the others. “You sing from here.” I gingerly touch his sides. He starts just the tiniest bit, but lets me rest my hands on him. I can feel him breathe under my palms. “Well, not sing, obviously,” I correct myself, flustered. “I mean… vocalize.”

“Just tell me what to do, doctor.” It comes out silky-soft, God, he’s humoring me.

“Well, you need to breathe in deeply, down here,” I say, trying to remember every scrap of advice from my own vocal coach. “Flex these muscles,” I urge, covering the target area with my hand. _He certainly has them_ , my mind points out before I have a chance to censor it. “Like this,” I say and place his palms on my diaphragm while I let out a long, deep note. He blinks a few times, surprised, and then his smile widens.

“I could never sound like that,” he says, and fuck, I think he means it. That he likes my voice.

“Course you can,” I insist. “Use these muscles, and let out a breath that kind of… uses… your throat to…” I struggle with the words. I’m no speech therapist. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to explain how to actually use your lungs and your vocal cords, and now I’m supposed to be an expert? Despairing of the correct words, I place two fingers on my Adam’s apple and look into his eyes to see if he understands. The slightest ghost of a frown passes over his face, but then he opens his mouth and a trembling, shy sound comes out. I nod enthusiastically, as much for the benefit of the one-way glass as for his. “That’s right. But sort of… _close_ your throat more.” I grimace at my ineptitude. Is that even what you do when you make a sound? Close your throat? It sounds insane.

But just then there’s the tiniest wisp of a singing voice, like a golden ribbon unfurling from his throat. My breath hitches at the sound. “Again,” I whisper. Concentrating hard, he breathes in and then emits a single note, strong and clear like the chime from a crystal glass. Long after his air runs out, it reverberates between the walls around us, ringing through the glass like the ancient lament of Echo come again to haunt the modern world. And I just stand there and stare. _This_ is what he sounds like? He had _this_ inside him all this time? I never stood a chance – I was always destined to fall in love with this creature, to be tied to him, body and soul. Nothing that sounds like that could ever make a home outside of my heart.

Maybe he sees the way I’m faltering, because he changes the subject abruptly. “So, Quinzel, is it? Just like the other one.”

“Uh… yeah.” I’m still lost in the sound of him. My pupils stretch like hungry wells.

“Guinevere Quinzel.” He tastes the words, eyes on me the entire time, perhaps to match the sounds to my altered face. “Gwen Quinn.” He snorts. “Well, that sounds utterly ridiculous. Queen Gwen? Queen Quinn.” He shakes his head. “So can I call you Harley?”

It takes me by complete surprise. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he just thought of the nickname. Which is what our onlookers will think, fortunately. But he’s also putting me on the spot, because how the hell do I respond to that?

“Wh… what?” I stall.

“Harley… Quinn.” He smiles. “Like the commedia dell’arte character.”

“Oh…” I do a quick calculation in my head and then trick my face into looking like it suppresses emotion, because of course the syllables Harley Quinn resemble the name of my dead sister, and I need to acknowledge that. For the sake of my scrupulous watchers, I need to react, suppress, and then take the barb in my stride and run with it, because that’s the kind of intuitive genius I’m impersonating here. Crafting a voice that’s the perfect balance of tremor and authority, I say, “I guess I can indulge one minor trespass from a former villain.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Former?”

I stare into his eyes, willing him to understand. _Please do this. Please just play along. Trust me like you’ve always done_.

“Okay.” He giggles a little and then extends his hand as far as he can with the shackles clanking on his wrists. I make the same movement automatically, and his fingers close on mine. Warm, strong, _alive_. “Hello, Harley,” he purrs, and it’s all I can do not to grin like a loony and sob at the same time. “So pleased to meet you. I’m Arthur.”

And bam, there it is: his old name. I can practically hear them gasp behind the glass.

To their minds, I’ve broken through.


	5. Supper's ready

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Can't you feel our souls ignite?  
> Shedding ever-changing colours  
> In the darkness of the fading night  
> Like the river joins the ocean  
> As the germ in a seed grows  
> We have finally been freed to get back home
> 
> ([Genesis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szJq1lwnkNw))

The rest is really just cosmetics. I’ve already proven myself, so who are they to question me? I’m the golden one, the magician who got to Arthur when they thought there was no Arthur left. They sign off on a weekly session and give me the inch-thick journal to add my scribbles where they gave up. In no time, I’m practically institution furniture. Invisible, taken for granted, safe.

Safe enough to become the one who takes the tea up to the head’s office in the mornings and afternoons. He wants to pick my brains about Joker, and I want to lace his with medicine. A little at a time, easy does it, no need to rush. And such a good boy he is to take sugar in his tea, because everyone knows that a spoonful of sugar makes everything go down.

Safe enough to warrant one-on-ones without a guard, without a glass wall? Not yet, apparently.

“Hello again, Harley. Here to continue where we left off? To gather your little pieces so you can build a life-sized replica of me to keep in your bed at night?”

I can imagine the wince on the face of whatever colleague is overseeing our session today.

“Why do you think I want a replica of you in my bed?” I ask, expecting him to leer some lewd joke.

But he grows serious instead. “Because you need data like a potter needs clay. And you think better at night.”

“You know, I think that’s true. Maybe we should schedule these appointments after dark, what do you think?”

“I think that would be absolutely smashing.”

So that’s what I get to work on, and my peers grudgingly rearrange the rules to suit me.

“You’re not falling for him, are you?” the head of the hospital cautions me. _Don’t go all Stockholm on us, you hear?_

“No,” I say, on auto-pilot, but in a way it’s true, isn’t it, because I fell for him long ago. Hook me up to a lie detector and I could honestly say that no, I’m not falling. I’m in so deep I can see nothing but white, and red, and blue.

“You’re playing into his hands, changing your schedule like this. Letting him goad you.”

“But I think the key is to humor him on the things that don’t matter, so that I can get under his skin about the things that do.”

After this, my colleagues can add ‘ambitious’ to my list of virtues, because I stay late at the hospital every night of the week. I get to know the nighttime staff, learn their quirks and hopes and dreams, note which ones can stay and which of them must be lured to daytime schedules.

And in my sessions with Joker, we gradually lower our guard. For every time we meet, we can stop pretending a little more.

“You just want people’s thoughts and feelings, patterns and behaviors, to build your inner world, to understand it,” Joker tells me at our next appointment, scheduled to toe the witching hour. “To be in charge of the meanings. So when you accuse other people of not understanding you–” He hesitates. “I mean, I’m assuming that’s a thing with you. That you feel misunderstood?”

I briefly purse my lips, and his eyes glint wicked amusement.

“What you’re really accusing them of is not _using_ you. Because that’s what we all do. We use other people to populate our version of reality. Take me, for example. Fuck it, they all do. They take me and put me in a box labeled ‘freak’, and then they shuffle that box around their chessboard along with all the other little boxes, trying to make sense of the game. So what’s unique about you?”

He waits a beat, allowing for a retort. But I truly have nothing to say. I’m supposed to be a song therapist, so all this isn’t even meant to be my forte.

“Let me guess,” he continues, and now he’s really enjoying himself. “What’s unique about you is that you allow for _difference_. For anomalies and fine-grained nuances. You see a freak, but you don’t stop there. You break the freak down into ever smaller particles. Like a beautician who sees a million colors where the rest of us only see twelve.”

“You’re calling me a beautician?”

Joker grins like a flower opening in stop motion, and that’s when it hits me: all of this, his teasing and pinching and prodding – it’s not an attack, or even a critique. It’s a fucking love letter. It’s the anguished, grateful, masochistic response to the article – how it tore him open and patched him up again. How it was the final rib breaking in his chest, how I ripped his heart out with my dark healer’s hands, wrecked him with ultimate understanding even as I stole his words and spoke with my researcher’s authority about his innermost truth. I haven’t allowed for the utter novelty of that. When I’ve done interviews in the past, my subjects have been fairly normal, with normal backgrounds. People have listened to them in their lives. Being heard by a random doctor in psychology was never an earth-shattering event for them.

But Joker? He _is_ the unheard. He’s the vacuum of silenced rage, the heart of absolute darkness in our fucked-up world. And then he was given the mic in a scholarly journal, propped up by a card-carrying know-it-all. He was pried open, the horror of his innards dumped in the middle of the dinner table, forced on the rest of the guests like a fucking conversation piece, impossible to ignore. My stomach plummets at the thought of what that must have been like for him. The Pearly Gates opening when you’re still lying face down in the gutter? Such a whiplash turn of events that you can’t parse the euphoria from utter dread.

“You let him toy with you,” the head says to me, eyeing the report from last night’s one-way glass informant. “Analyze _you_ , when it should be the other way around.”

“What do you think I’m doing, though? As long as he talks, I get my data. I build my replica.”

“Replica? Miss Quinn…”

I smother a smile at the way he says my name, my real name, not knowing how real it is. “I’ve told you. I lure him in with acceptance. That’s what he lacks, what he’s lacked his whole life.”

But I take his advice anyway, take it and use it for my own ends. In our next session, I ask, “You’ve said you can’t see people clearly enough to consciously channel them. That you just stumbled into it. So how come you can see _me_ so clearly?” This man, this stranger, who came to me in the night four years ago and just read me like a fucking recipe. How was it possible?

He spreads his hands, making the chains clink. “Because you _let_ me. You give me something to see. No one can listen without the gift of something to listen to. Someone has to trust you with something real, otherwise how can you see them?”

“You mean I’m not hiding from you.”

“Yes. But _you_ know how to delve for those secrets in people who don’t want to be seen. The people who clamor to drown out their truths with pointless babble. I can’t sift through the babble, but you can. Your genius isn’t in traditional logic, Harley. You’re not even all that smart compared to most of your peers, are you? And anyway, what you do have in IQ, your laziness makes up for.”

“Ouch.”

“So that word you love to use about yourself – intelligent – what is it but your father’s assessment?”

The truth is bitter to the taste, and I say nothing. The head will give me an earful about it, but I'll play the recently bereaved card, since Francis Quinzel has quietly departed. None too soon, mind you, since he could have raised a stink about not having a daughter named Guinevere.

“What makes you stand out is your openness," Joker says. "You see possibilities where others cling to their patterns. You hear uncomfortable truths when others shut down.”

My cheeks burn in equal parts mortified bliss and existential dread. I’ve never received a more welcome compliment in my life. It rips through me like a chainsaw. It’s horrible to be so seen. To be _accepted_ , despite being seen. There’s a kind of magnanimity when someone loves you despite your faults. It puts you in debt. It elevates them to a moral high ground that you strive in vain to be worthy of.

“So when you talk about your intelligence, what it’s really about is your ability to make replicas of people and move them around in your head according to the system you’ve made in there. And the thing is, most of the time people do follow their predestined paths. They do act logically in a twisted way. They repeat their patterns and they’re caught in the same traps again and again. And of course after a lifetime of that…”

I give a sigh, but there’s no point going off script, because he’s right. “… meeting someone who embodies chaos can’t help but be exhilarating.”

He stares at me placidly. “So you’ll lose interest now, because I’m in the ultimate trap and the possibility for movement is vastly reduced. I’ll just do the same thing over and over, caged panther style.”

“No. You said it. I can take red and blue and green and divide it into vermilion, scarlet, carmine, blood, crimson, and ruby. And if you stay in here, and I stay in here, I’ll be able to divide ruby into ten facets, and those into a hundred more. It’ll never end, and you know why?”

He cocks his head, goes all feral kitten. “No, why?”

I drop my gaze and study the table, because I don't need feral kitten in my brain right now. Fucks me right up where rational thought is concerned. “Because if people can be explained, if behavior can be predicted just as long as you have all the factors…”

“If you subscribe to determinism,” he cuts in.

“Whatever. I don’t give a fuck about those words anymore. But if humans are actually explainable, if each of our actions is an inevitable consequence of something else and there really is no free will but just an endless matrix of inevitable actions and reactions… Then the context is never-ending. However much you study it, you’ll never get the whole picture until you have God’s perspective – the ultimate bird’s-eye view – and can see all the butterfly wings that flutter all over the world, influencing each minute decision.”

He grins. “And do you think you’ll live long enough to become God?”

“Understand his creation, or create my own?”

He shrugs, as if it’s not important – as if the distinction doesn’t even exist. Understanding, creating. Isn’t it all the same?

***

And in the end, I exercise my godlike powers on the head of the hospital. His preexisting condition predictably deteriorates. In an appropriate amount of time the ruler of Arkham State Hospital is no more. Oh, woe is me.

 _But look, there’s a prime candidate that’s played the political game well enough to get the vote._ _Didn’t she do a smashing job in New Jersey?_

 _You know what, I think she did_.

It’s like stealing candy from kids. As soon as the keys are on my chain, I shuffle the cards, bribe the undesirables in the night staff with raises if they cross the line to sunshine hours. Then I fill the slots of darkness with people from our network, to be sure they’re properly malleable. Finally I send for the doctor who pronounced me dead to preside over the nocturnal nine-to-five.

And the lunatics have literally taken over the asylum.

***

“So you want to come out and play, or what?”

He looks up, uncertain, eyeing the unlocked door to his cell like a caged animal that’s not quite sure it wants back in the wild. But that’s just it: he doesn’t need to. For once, he has his multiple choice, and I’m the one to have given it to him.

I lead the way up on the roof and he follows me because what else can he do, but he doesn’t get it, not yet. I need him to see the beauty of it with his own eyes: during the day, he’s the shackled killer, safe behind bars with his pills and gloopy hospital food on endless trays, as endless as his days. But at night he can be anyone.

When it dawns on him, there’s a look in his eye – an alien burst of light I don’t think I’ve ever seen. It sucks at my chest, and I think I recognize the feeling, because it also echoes in me: it’s joy. Too much to bear. Because he can be caught and free at will now. He can slip out and wreak some havoc when the humor takes him, or he can stay in for a quiet night of fuck-all if that’s his fancy.

“You can even be Carnival again.” I giggle, but I’m actually half serious. “Entertain the inmates.”

He slathers me in that sexy-arrogant smile of his. “You just want to masturbate to greasepaint.”

I shrug. “It’s not a crime.”

He shakes his head, but it's not to negate me. Instead he heaves a deep sigh as he looks out over the city, a sigh that seems contented rather than frustrated. As if, just for tonight, he’s fine with not being the one to run whatever project is afoot down there. As if he prefers, just for once, to be on this roof with me instead of grappling with Batman. My chest aches for him, for his past and his future, for the moment I can’t contain because even this second is too big for me to comprehend. For all my understanding, I won’t understand this until it’s become a memory.

Turning to me again, he holds out his hand with something so impossibly close to tenderness on his face that I can't deal. “May I?”


	6. Come fly with me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once I get you up there  
> Where the air is rarefied  
> We'll just glide  
> Starry-eyed
> 
> Once I get you up there  
> I'll be holding you so near  
> You might hear  
> Angels cheer ’cause we're together
> 
> ([Frank Sinatra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQq6yLe2ww))

_She places her hand in his and lets herself be swept off into a moonlit dance, high above the lights of the city. Her body touches him like burns, and it’s fire, this circling, shifting pattern of their limbs. They don’t follow any steps, no discernable rhythm, he never does – but now neither does she, and somehow they still match each other. Sometimes he thinks he’s the one that steers, but other times it’s her. The power ebbs and flows like a tide, and one moment he rides the crest of a wave, only to be sucked under and pulled out to sea in a swirl of colors._

_Moving as if in a dream, he leans closer until her breath pries at his lips. Her mouth is open, her eyes glistening with something hot and dangerous. Cheeks singed and blond hair sparking electricity. Her perfume… He has a moment to breathe it in, to feel it curl around his synapses like a drug._

_This is what they talk about. This is the secret._

_Then she covers his mouth with lips that feel ravenous. Soft and strong, they mold themselves against him, just as her body molds itself against his. Flailing and falling in the darkness of his mind, he feels every dip and line, every moving muscle underneath her skin. Her hands grab at his hips, pull him closer, align them_ there _, and he lets her, because she won’t cross the line. She’s just tumbling, pushing and dancing, miming the yearning for another dance, on a different level._ I want this, god I want this, _his mind keeps repeating,_ this and nothing else, because this I understand _._

_Everywhere they touch, a healing light seems to spread. Everything that is broken and sore sighs into that fervent touch, and for a moment it’s all okay. Every gaping wound closes under the onslaught. He can feel, in slow motion, the fountain rise in him, so similar to what people describe, but it won’t find a concrete outlet, he knows that now. It’s pure music: how it surges in a thousand rivulets through veins and nerves and tissue whose only function is to answer one single call – the call of her._

_A normal person would come. But the heat that spills over in him is something else, and it’s what it has always been. The part of him that erupts the way it needs to. Who cares what other people want?_

_But he takes care of her. There’s nothing to stop him from that. She offers so desperately, and he touches her like she wants to be touched, fiercely. He imagines himself like a weapon, the power it gives – a blade, a gun, a baseball bat – and assaults her with it, because otherwise he wouldn’t know what to do. But she wants that from him: the mercilessness. He can give it to her. He watches her turn, unrecognizable now in the throes of raw need, face flushed and wanton, soul caught up in lust without shame. A marionette to his hands, she lets him go deep, push her into a pleasure he can’t share and yet he can, because deeper and deeper, he’s let so far inside…_

_Until suddenly her body just locks, stiff and shuddering, and a wave of intangible warmth joins them in such sticky sweetness that their borders are completely erased._

_She goes limp in his arms, and he keeps on moving, dancing, and now she doesn’t make any effort to steer. She just follows wherever he goes. He pulls her with him, twirls her around, goes close to the edge of the roof and skirts it like a tramp on roller skates just for the sheer illicit thrill of it. Sex and death, two halves of a dance they can only perform together._

_“You’re crazy,” she whispers into his hair._

_He smiles, and if Batman were here, hanging from one of his bungee lines, the smile would be upside down. “Is that your final diagnosis?”_

_“Hm,” she chuckles, and the sound caresses his skin, makes him bleed in all the right ways. She’s ruined his defenses and inscribed his flesh with her initial, but so has he on hers. He’s put his hand inside her like a puppet and she’s done things in his name. They’ve exploded each other, stamped themselves on the other’s shoulder like demon and angel all rolled into one. They’re infinity mirrors, facing each other to create a million reflections. It’s ugly and it’s beautiful and it doesn’t make sense, like the Rock Zen Garden where you can never see the fifteenth boulder. They’re each other’s fourteen visible stones, and the thing between them, what neither of them can see but both of them know is there, is the final stone._

_“I hate you so much.”_

_He strokes her hair. “Because I cracked you open and found your heart of darkness? But what you wrote when you dipped your pen in blood instead of ink is better than anything else you’ve done. Am I wrong?”_

_“Of course not. But…” She seems to wrestle with the words like living, writhing things. “I can grieve too. Grieve… the loss of a normal life.”_

_She pulls away, and they slow to an almost-stop, an on-the-spot, gentle dance without a goal. Her eyes meet his in dangerous understanding. It’s something they don’t discuss, not even now: that they’re only with each other because everyone else doesn’t measure up. If one of them had been normal, they would never have met. Their wavelengths would have kept them too far apart. She would have read about him in the paper and pursed her lips while she buttered her children’s toast._ Tsk, tsk. Can you believe the things people do? _And part of her would have been content with such a life. Not the kids, obviously. That’s just a figure of speech. But the sunshine breakfast Norman Rockwell tableau. She would have shone in the role of boring nobody._

_But here she is, in charge of Arkham By Night – The Craziest Show on Earth._

_As if in answer, the sky gives a flicker. They both look up at the now-familiar symbol of resistance from the goody-two-shoes side of the violence spectrum._

_“So I was wondering…”_

_She’s not wondering, of course. She’s telling him, like she always does. But he lets her, because if you can’t adapt your edges to the piece that almost fits, you’ll never be part of a puzzle at all._

_“Wayne sort of implied that you might not have been abused after all.”_

_He gives a wan smile that she can’t see because they’re both still staring at the sky. Use, abuse. A punch in the face or the blows you can’t see. If you pummel someone with a bar of soap in a towel so there are no marks, has it really happened? If a tree falls in the woods and it doesn’t hit you on the head but it destroys your soul, how do you make people hear it? Sometimes the concrete, the sight of actual blood, is all the argument you have. Chop off your leg so it can scream in your stead: let me escape this fucking race._

_And he dares to ask it – the simple, unadorned heart of him, the question that sums him up: “Is it important?”_

_She breathes in and holds it. Then: “I guess not.” On the outbreath, he can feel her whole being relax, her mind take a break. Just accept the here and now, because who knows, after all. The brain is a funny thing. "Maybe that’s the joke at the end of your journal. That just being Happy was enough of a tragedy.”_

**Author's Note:**

> My writing is born out of desperate need. Once that need - for a couple to end up together, for someone to get closure or break free - is lulled, my urge to write dies down. I can feel it happen, feel it sink away into oblivion at the bottom of my soul. It's finished.
> 
> This was finished, or it teetered on the edge of falling. But then I binge-watched the three seasons of _Hannibal_ and I COULD NOT DEAL with the fucking feels. My heart was ripped right open again, and the angst was channeled into the final instalment of this. So if the Fannibals among you find the imagery in _There is no punchline_ familiar... yeah, I'm in so much debt, I can't even tell you. That series opened the door to a world of words. Somehow the pictures became language in me, like a new inkwell to dip my pen in.
> 
> So Kat, thank you for the tip. It saved this fic and ruined my life! :D <3


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